Short Story by Jocko Weyland from Vice Magazine
http://vice.typepad.com/vice_magazine/2008/01/fiction—joc-1.html?cid=98780906#comment-98780906
Hanging out at the park on a sunny Los Angeles winter afternoon, lying on the grass, reading, taking it in while unfortunately having to endure the Mexican evangelical preacher squawking away in Spanish on a megaphone at the far end. I mean really, why, why, why must they impose their insipidity on people just trying to have a nice time in the park in the name of Jesus. And so loudly. Really fucking annoying. There’s a joke: What’s the difference between Jesus and Mexicans? Answer: Jesus didn’t have tattoos of Mexicans all over his body.
Anyway that’s one thing to deal with but for the most part a pleasant experience while down on the lawn three Asian kids and one black kid, about five or six years old, are throwing a smaller-than-regulation football around. Then this young modish couple comes and lies down, in their twenties, the guy has those overly-belled $300 jeans that scrape the ground and those pointy low-slung shoes that are really au currant at the moment. The ball came toward them and then he’s up and “Hey you guys want to play?” Which is nice enough I suppose but right away it was aggravating because he starts organizing them into teams, setting down rules, and barking orders. “Hike it to me!’, “Don’t throw sidearm” (followed by an overhand demonstration), “You got it, you got it—oh –you could have caught it!”, “C’mon Mickey” (he’d learned their names), and the ubiquitous “Nice job!” Then for good measure he starts throwing the ball close to his girlfriend lying on the grass, hahaha dude, though it was pretty funny to watch the black kid laugh when it almost hit her. This went on for a while and it’s all fine and good but his voice started getting even more irritating than the predicador who was still zealously proselytizing a hundred yards away. And not only was his voice annoying, it was just the whole thing, this blithe and unquestioning importing of his adult rules and prerogatives to these kids’ essentially formless anarchic fun they were having just throwing the ball around and falling over each other until he showed up. He took the fun out of it. The whole interaction could be seen as a comment on sports in general; on how they are leeched of spontaneity and glee by rigid governing regulations and principles, but it’s also just further proof that grown-ups have a tendency to screw up just about everything when they try to enter the world of children with their detrimental meddling, Adults seem incredibly proficient at that. Leave the kids alone.
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An unter-geek trashed the story
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